Grinivil first impressions
Transcript
I have a lot to say about this very unique game. A few months ago, I noticed some buzz online about Grinville, a Kickstarted game from last year that was recently delivered this year. I was intrigued and I got into contact with the designer, Rudy Pinski, to see if there were any copies available for purchase. Fortunately, I snagged a copy and was able to play it. Now, I have only one official play of it, but I do want to play it more. But before that happens, I wanted to formally give you my thoughts on it by talking about the mechanisms that make this game feel unique, go over some game comparisons, and go over a peer review of what others have said about this game before wrapping up with my first impressions. Grrenville is a citybuilding game that brings a heavily economic approach to it, which garners in part its high complexity rating of around 3.6 on Board Game Geek. Everything is tied to the time activation ring or tar where a modular rondelle is assembled before the game and dictates what actions you can take and in what order they might be in for the game. I won't go through all the actions, but one unique thing about this Rondell system is that after certain actions as depicted on the tile, you must move your token forward a number of spots on the time activation ring, which may force you to pass an action that you would like to take next. You can spend money to backtrack, though, which introduces a small but powerful decisions uh each turn as to whether you
should spend that money to do so. The other major factor about this game is shared infrastructure building where players each can contribute to building floors of different types of buildings. Contributing is beneficial as you can gather monetary rewards for taking part in the building of a residence as it's sold to occupants or to public buildings as well. Even the land that expands Grenavville, named parcels, can be owned by the person who finally placed it, giving them money whenever someone decides to build on that particular parcel. Finally, the resident cards dictate where a lot of the points come from in this game. They feature an all-inclusive offering of points determined by what buildings and trees must be on the board for them to move in, optimal rewards if buildings are on the board, as well as endgame points available if municipal buildings are finished by the end of the game. The whole game and how the game end trigger is made depends on how fast these residents can be moved in throughout the game.
Many people have compared this game to a splatter type experience. And so for as an example, I think food chain magnate is a close comparison to this game. Both games offer a shared infrastructure that players fight for as well as a predominantly economic money focused engine that drives gameplay. Many decision points in food chain magnate are dictated by food demands and the location of those houses that need food compared to how far away they are from restaurants, which is closest to, you know, whoever is closest gets to sell that food. And that is reminiscent of the distance factor that certain residents need to be housed in Grinville. Those are some small examples, but I'll talk about broader comparisons in design style at the end of the video, so stay tuned. Other smaller examples I walked away for game comparisons included the market of resources. It felt very comparable to games like Brass and Clans of Calonia where supply and demand make resources cheaper or more expensive depending on the state and flow of the game.
There are also games like City of the Big Shoulders and other games with stock investment and manipulation like 18XX games where decisions about investing jointly into stocks and other players with other players in those games or the building of floors of buildings in Grrenville offer a complex decision as to where you want to go, where you need to go for residence and hopefully to accomplish your goals without having to give up a lot of money or inversely to reap a small benefit from the action of others if you do see that they need to take certain spots and you go ahead and build them up and hope to profit from their future actions. Finally, the storage concept of resources was very reminiscent of the colonists where there is a slight puzzle for where to store resources and what kinds to have, all the while having the ability to expand your storage capabilities during the game for greater flexibility.
Only 183 people at the time of this recording have rated and commented on Grimville. Many people have good things to say about this game. People who enjoy an interactive game in terms of interaction on a shared board or shared space rather than on individual tableau have praised this game for how much interaction there is on Grrenville proper. Not only with the buildings but with the economics behind them. For those who enjoy a game without guard rails that allows for mistakes, like many Splatter games, people like that element in this game, too. The variable puzzle that the tar offers makes each game feel different, where certain combinations of actions and proximity or distance from one another alter what individual games might offer as efficiencies and um things that you could probably want to chase after or not. And not only that, the stack of tiles that you can interchange into the tar also bring interesting variability.
Meaning there is a stack of a particular type of tile. These are tiles that you can activate with workers during the game and they last for like one cycle of yourself going around the tar. So there are five of these tiles and there's probably more than five other tiles in a stack that you can choose from. all the different actions that are very variable from one another and so you can interchange them and that really can create a lot of variability from game to game. On the other hand, most of the criticisms came from a collection of the rule book being hard to understand and read the artwork or iconography being hard to decipher and other nitpicks with the some choices and rules such as not being able to draft your starting cards.
Uh things like that. They were also mentioned by some players on Board Game Geek. My first impression encompasses a lot of what other people said, both good and bad. And while I save my more objective ratings and criteria for after I've played a game a few times, I will give this game an 8 out of 10 as a first impression. First, my play of it with four players was rough. Honestly, despite all of us having learned the rules, learning from the rule book as was tough and as well as reference referencing it during the game was an issue. It was difficult to follow and understand at times. It considerably added to our play time and we got many basic rules or seemingly basic rules wrong. [snorts] Some of which would have greatly altered how the game played out. I'm okay with the art, but sometimes the iconography wasn't clear. For example, with the victory point track, it was hard to follow at times and sometimes you, you know, made a small mistake on jumping the track and, you know, jumping up 10 points or something like when you shouldn't have.
So, little things like that made it a little difficult at times to decipher. Uh, sometimes it was hard to decipher the cards, too. They seemed a little busy to me with all the information for what residents needed uh that wasn't optional, the things that were optional, and the endgame triggers. You know, sometimes it was kind of uh difficult, especially at a distance, to parse out what they needed. Despite all of us having a rough go, though, I came away excited to play this game again. I really do love the puzzle of the variable nature of the time activation ring. And now with a better understanding of the game as a whole, I feel like I could make better decisions and identify interesting solutions from the residents and what is offered in your hand as well as on the market and the order of the tar and to make decisions like that. You know, in a broader sense, I do like that this game has some elements that are reminiscent of splatter games, but I do feel like there's some uniqueness to this particular puzzle of Grenavville.
Splatter games in and of themselves can be very unforgiving where if you by either your own choices or even the choices of others get put into a position of ill fortune or lack of resources, there literally can be nothing you can do to get out of it and you're virtually kicked out and knocked out of the game. I can think of this being the case in games like Food Chain Magnate, uh, Antiquity, you name it. Grrenville has a cutthroat interaction, but with more flexibility and forgiveness than a typical Splatter game. For example, in my game, I ran out of money partway through the game. And part of this was uh, you and it might have occurred differently if we followed the rules better or understood them. But in any case, I didn't have money for a portion of the game. When you go around the time activation ring, like passing go in Monopoly, you would have to owe taxes when you passed the very first spot, which and we got this rule completely wrong in our game. We overpaid our taxes in this game essentially.
If you don't have money, you the penalty is you just give up a victory point as we interpreted it. And so, uh, I could afford to do that and I could, uh, go around the tar quite often once I realized I could just had to give up a victory point. And at that point of the game, I had enough victory points to be competitive. And so it was worth it for me to lose that point and speed through the tar to go to those actions that didn't necessarily require money but got me some resources so I could continue building and be competitive in the game. For example, I focused on building roads, right? And so I really progressed up the road track and that gave me like 50 points or I should say, yeah, it gave me 50 money for reaching a certain point in the track and that got me back into the game to buy things that I needed to continue on throughout the game. I like that in this game that there is a centralized focus of getting residents into the city. Everyone needs to do that and should do that to be competitive and a lot of the victory points do come from that. But I also liked that you could specialize a little bit like buying or building a lot of roads or focusing on trees. You know, someone else planted a lot of trees in our game too and got a lot of points from that and money as well. And so they were the tree person, I was the road person and everyone else kind of played a mixture of both and focused on residents honestly. So, you
know, someone could be the parcel person or the the floor builder or whatever. And so it ends up being quite an interactive almost cooperative uh type of experience. I guess another game that kind of offers that is Lands right in a completely different way, but you are semi-ooperatively working to build up Grinville and you have to do certain things and probably get to do certain things if other players are allowed to and you know proceed to building out certain aspects of Grinville. So you're kind of waiting. It's kind of like a cat and mouse type of interaction with floor building for example where you want to contribute the most obviously to you know get as many benefits as you can from building a certain building whether it's a residence or public building but uh at the same time you probably can't do that and be efficient. And so sometimes allowing other people to come in and help you build does cost you a little bit of money, but in the end it could get you the resident, you know, sold into the building that or into the house that gets you a lot of points or something like that and a lot of money.
So ultimately, I thought there was a good balance between flexibility and cutthroat interaction in this game that felt unique compared to a typical splatter, even though it was reminiscent of it. Uh, one player in my game, for example, mentioned the hindrance of this game being a playerdriven ending where it comes to the how the game is triggered versus a game that has a set number of rounds. So, that was an interesting discussion point there and I wanted to touch on that. Many popular games like Ark Nova feature a more playerdriven endgame and that made this particular game of Granville rough for us on top of all the rules mistakes that we made. Uh, and and I should mention too, like a lot of the rules that we didn't get right were ones regarding how money or like like how taxes w were done. Um, who benefits from building onto the same building and things like that. And so uh and the resources as well like uh especially going around the tax uh doing the taxes kind of we figured out how to do that properly throughout the game which affected the resources as well as how much money we were spending in taxes. And so there was yeah there was a lot that we got wrong and it mostly had to do with like paying each other money for building on the same spot or things like that. And so, uh, what this game also was rough for for some of the members of our group was that, uh, it was a playerdriven ending and
experience. And I get that like we had an interesting debate about this. And it's like, it's easier to obviously grasp what the end game will be if you know how many rounds there are. You can see it on a board where everyone kind of knows there's four rounds to this game. and you know, you take so many turns and that's it. When it's playerdriven, especially in a first play or your first few plays of a game and you don't know the strategy behind it or it it isn't immediately present to you in your mind, it can be really tough to gauge how quickly you need to do certain things in the game, when to stop pursuing certain objectives. And this happened to me where I was trying to like halfway through the game focus on after building roads just focus on building public buildings so I could participate in endgame opport opportunities. However, I ran out of time and did not build out any public buildings at all. And so or at least finish them. And so that was of detriment to me. And if I knew how much time I actually had, that would have potentially ended differently for me.
And for others too, they also had other goals as far as putting down the resident cards. If there is a penalty if you you you start the game with two cards, you can get more or you can switch out to keep two and you know switch cards from the market to your hand. If you have any residence left over in your hand, you lose 10 points. And 10 points is a significant amount in this game. And so the last few turns when we've, you know, suddenly realized that, hey, you know, we probably only had, you know, a handful of turns left over, we uh, you know, might not be able to get out all the residents from our hands and we would lose a lot of points. And so that also is a a painful lesson to learn. And it's hard when you do have a game like this where it is the first time you play and it's a playerdriven experience to uh if you know things aren't really as coherent or clear to you as far as what you're trying to accomplish and and how much time you have that they can be you can leave that experience feeling like it's not as good. But on the other hand, I do see that a playerdriven experience increases the interaction and increases the level of you not just looking at your state, but everyone else's tableau or state on the board as well. Uh the endgame trigger is based off of how many floor blocks you still have left over. If you have two or less, then the end game is triggered. And so over time, if you do play the game a lot, it really could be
a way to race the game to um not leave a lot of time for your opponents or to slow down and allow yourself to build up for combos and things like that. And so, so I can see that argument going both ways. And I thought that was an interesting observation that we made from our game. And speaking on that too, it was really cool how the game trigger ends. Like once someone gets to that point, you can either choose to stay where you are on the rondelle or to start all the way over, pay taxes, but then you have one complete loop to finish if you choose to do so. And you know, that could be any number of turns that you choose and any number of uh tiles to stomp on. And if someone else ends the game uh faster, they if it comes back to them and there are still people taking turns, they just get money which will calculate out to points at the end of the game. So, I thought that was a really unique and interesting way to incorporate a playerdriven game end as well as a way to keep you getting points and and uh engaged in the game in in a certain sense even though it's not your turn to play an action since you finished. So anyway, that debate aside, ultimately for Grinville, so just wrapping it up here, I despite the issues that I had with the rules and icons, uh I I do see the genius of this game and I want to play it again. Uh especially with all the rules understood and followed. I I would love to see there is a player aid on the on a sheet
of paper. Uh one side tells you how to build or what requirements and resources you need to build. The other side gives you a worded breakdown of each turn. I would love to see some more of the nuanced rules that we missed in terms of, you know, what happens when you build with someone else or uh what happens with taxes. Yeah, you know, everything uh maybe I just missed it, but and maybe the player aid is pretty good, but I would love to see that and the iconography explained a little bit better. Um, but I do think that the juice is worth a squeeze here. I think this game has a lot of cool features that are familiar yet unique and it creates an interactive economic experience that I think if you do enjoy Splatter games and some of the other games that I mentioned in the comparisons, I think you would enjoy this game as well. So, uh, so I I hope that I get to play this soon again and continue to explore the strategy, explore the new tiles and variations for how they are formed on the time activation ring and hopefully uh continue to enjoy this game and have it rise in my estimations. So, those are my first impressions of Grinville. Let me know what you think of this game if you've played it or if you uh do like it if or if you don't like it, let me know as well. Uh, thank you very much for listening and I hope or watching and I hope that you have a great day. Take care.